WHO IS GENNADI ZYUGANOV? AND HOW HAS HE BROUGHT A MORIBUND MOVEMENT BACK TO THE THRESHOLD OF NEAR ABSOLUTE POWER?

Back in the early 1990s, when Russia's Communists seemed to be fading into irrelevance, Gennadi Zyuganov used to visit an apartment overlooking Pushkin Square in Moscow, his arms laden with pastries and other delicacies baked by his wife. The apartment belonged to Alexander Prokhanov, a virulently nationalistic newspaper editor, and the occasion was an unlikely gathering of politicians, generals and intellectuals from the far right and far left of Russia's ideological spectrum. With little in common save a shared conviction that Boris Yeltsin was destroying the motherland, the members of Prokhanov's salon would practice running the country together. They would form...